The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

50 The hungry goat: Iranian animation, media archaeology and located visual worlds Kathryn Weir In 2005, an Iranian archaeologist revealed an extraordinary insight into the sequence of images painted on an earthenware pot excavated in the 1970s from the 5000-year-old city of Shahr-e Sukhte. 1 The excavation of the ‘burnt city’, so-called as it was repeatedly destroyed by fire, is situated in the Sistan-Baluchistan province in the south-east of Iran. Apart from making pottery and growing crops, the ancient inhabitants of the city wove and knitted dyed threads, and created complex games. The pot features five sequential images of a goat jumping up to eat leaves from a tree; its goblet shape — a bowl on a stem — could function to spin the pot as an optical device, allowing a viewer to perceive movement and duration and constituting a form of animation. Whether or not the motifs were actually viewed in this way, the pot remains an important expression of the desire to represent time and movement. The art of animation in Iran today draws on rich visual languages and techniques which incorporate the artistic heritage of textile design, Persian folk tales and literature, calligraphy, and miniature painting, as well as the motifs of interior design, ceramics and architecture. The APT6 cinema project The Cypress and the Crow: 50 Years of Iranian Animation profiles influential senior figures, including Esfandiar Ahmadieh, Abdollah Alimorad, Vadjiollah Fard Moghadam, Ali Akbar Sadeghi and Noureddin Zarrinkelk, through to the current generation of talented emerging artists. Animation is recognised in Iran as a medium which is closely related to drawing, painting and the graphic arts. A direct reference to the Shahr-e Sukhte pot’s sequential hungry goat motifs is found in Moin Samadi’s Boz Bazi (Boz Game) 2007, a short animation which shows the goat jumping off the pot and cavorting across Persian history, occasionally leaping up to score points, in a pastiche of the Super Mario Brothers video games. The work riffs on race-to-the-finish-line, teleological accounts of culture, art and animation, in which present glorious achievements are predetermined by past discoveries and successes, with the points accumulating until it’s ‘game over’. In his influential essay of 2004 ‘The new film history as media archaeology’, film and media theorist Thomas Elsaesser discusses how the histories of the relationships between art forms and their technologies have been told in evolutionary terms, identifying origins and tracing lines of descent. 2 Elsaesser proposes an approach to constellations of related or parallel phenomena, histories in which the irrecoverable past ‘can be seized only by a hermeneutics of the fragment, a discourse of metonymies, and an “allegorical” view of (always already lost) totalities’. 3 The past is ultimately inaccessible, but the fragments and forms which remain can be reinterpreted by historians, and also by artists. The hungry goat pot would accordingly be understood not as part of a linear sequence of aesthetic or optical discoveries, but rather as an instance of visual language representing movement and duration, not necessarily less or more complex than other languages developed at other times. In Bache ha dar moozeh (Children at the Museum) 1987, Abdollah Alimorad combines live action and animation to represent children’s imaginations animating objects and bringing their motifs to life. He points to how the objects — or remaining traces of another era, in this case conserved in a museum — which